Conformity is important for humanity, we need to learn to communicate in ways that seem less threatening to each other if we hope to maintain our fight against violence, however it’s also important that our individual differences stil get a chance to shine especialy as our society becomes more hyper specialised. This post is about my struggles with being weird and how I’ve learned to fit in to a degree.

Violence is a sensitive subject, to face it, to focus on it is to focus on some of the most uncomfortable flaws of our own humanity. It’s worth addressing these flaws, it’s worth fixing them. You might feel powerless but I hope to relieve you of that sensation by the time you’ve read the blog post.

As a software developer, the bane of my life is bugs, I hate them, I feel so stressed by them. Every time I see a bug in my work before someone else does I have to stop myself from wanting to hide it completely. It’s so natural to want to hide or avoid the problem, but we as developers need to tackle it head on.

Code Reviews

Quality needs to start in code reviews, anything you change in your team starts with code reviews. It’s where you educate everyone on your team on what each part of the software does and where you communicate the standards that need to be followed.

A friend of mine put me onto docker a few weeks ago and since then I’ve become rather obsessed with all things docker. I’ve gone from tinkering around with containers to recommending my company look into a strategy that will fully containerize our asp.net application.

Public health is a barrier to economic growth, so it is an essential part of a successful strategy for a nation. When we look internationally we can all see the disparity between how capable different nations are at handling this global challenge. It’s something worth thinking about.

Windows 10 was released today and the first thing I did when I got it installed it try to get chocolatey working. Wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped but it still integrates really nicely with Window’s new packaging system.

OneGet is the new package manager for Windows 10. It’s similar to apt-get, it treats Chocolatey is sort of a repo but also a plugin.

So yesterday I talked about how hard it is to get the information on candidates running for election you need to make an informed vote. In this post I’d like to describe some of the current methods you can use to get information on which candidates are running and if they have been previously elected, what they have done when in power.

This is the first election I’ve actually spent time researching the individual candidates before voting, there are 17 candidates so as you can imagine it took quite a long time, and even though I spent Friday Evening, most of Saturday and Sunday evening on it, I still made some mistakes which I found out once I sent and email to every candidate informing them that I had written and published the blog.

So if you are looking at this post you are probably wondering the same thing I was, who should I vote for in the upcoming election. We really should have started looking into this earlier, maybe next time. It’s actually a lot of work to research each of these candidates and I really can’t find an easy way of finding out information about them so I’m probably going to prioritise candidates that give out the most information on the internet.

It can be extremely difficult to be proud of being a transgender person. People have been telling me for a long time that transgender people are freaks, that we are delusional and that we shouldn’t be accepted because it might encourage others to do the same.

When you receive a lot of messages like that you can internalise them and almost believe them about yourself, and even if you don’t believe them, you might believe that the people around you believe them and sometimes, you’re right.

I think the new self service machines in Tesco are great, they are quick, I’m not embarrassed about giving them a pile of random change or paying for whatever the random change at the bottom of my bag doesn’t cover with my credit card and I think it’s rather cool that a human doesn’t need to do that anymore, I doubt it’s a fun job.